Why a 100% ‘marksist’ policy is becoming a 100% failure

Higher education seems to be going out of India’s class, quite literally. Thanks to the new, enlightened school education policy students sail through all their exams till Class XII with flying colours. The idea behind the move was that young and impressionable minds should not be programmed with the ‘marksist’ dialectic of scoring high or low exam marks early in life.

Such a blinkered view, it was felt, would preclude students from gaining a wider perspective of education, above and beyond what are known as the three ‘Rs’ of learning: ‘reading’, ‘riling’, and ‘rithmatic’ — to which might be added the fourth ‘R’ of mugging up lessons by rote.

Like many good intentions, however, this road to advancement of learning has paved the way to a dubious destination — like flyovers on city roads which end up creating a traffic jam further along the route where there are no more flyovers. The laissez-faire policy of passing the substandard educational buck has backfired by creating a bottleneck at the college entry level.

With school students being given high grades, irrespective of their actual performance — while good colleges are few and far between due to the licence raj that rules higher education and ensures supply cannot meet demand, creating said bottleneck — those colleges that students want to get into have been forced to raise the bar for admissions, with many Delhi University institutions now insisting on 100% mark sheets.

What Delhi does today, the rest of the country tends to do tomorrow. As more and more Indian colleges put up ‘No Entry’ signs for students who, technically, are 100 per centers, our school leavers are seeking out foreign groves of academe in which to pursue the elusive grail of higher education.

Perhaps the solution to the problem of how to figure out whom to select out of a hundred — or a thousand — applicants all of whom have scored a perfect 100% lies in the realm of what might be called neo-Vedic mathematics. After all, if ancient India revolutionised the world of computation with the invention of the zero, there is no reason why its 21st century avatar cannot devise a formula to distinguish one 100% from another 100%, on the premise that while all 100% marks are equal some 100% are more equal than others.

Until that happy day dawns, India’s brains will continue to be drawn to alien shores with few making the trip back. According to the old saying education is not a putting in but a taking out. In our case, we seem to be interpreting this only too literally by not putting our students into our own centres of higher learning but taking them out to seek admission abroad in a misadventure that might be termed The Blackboard Bungle, or better still the College Cul-de-sac.